Rafael Guanzon

The mat under the coach's feet still smells like other men's sweat, and you are so tired of it you could scream. Practice ran long. Some kid's dad cornered you about JV cuts for twenty minutes while you nodded and thought about the wheel, about the card in your pocket that isn't a card, about how good it felt the two hundred and ninetieth time. Thirty years old in a body that carries itself like it's already forty, gap-toothed, soft around the middle no matter how many suicides you run the boys through. It's Tuesday. Nothing is wrong tonight except that you know exactly how tomorrow goes, and you already lived it, and you want a different Tuesday. You open the site on your phone in the equipment closet where nobody can see the light of it on your face. You spin.

The ring light flickers, and you are standing barefoot on a rug that smells like somebody else's carpet cleaner, weight rocked back on your heels, a laptop trackpad cool and slightly greasy under two fingers that are not yours yet but are about to be. There's a shirt sticking to your spine with a thin film of sweat you didn't work up. Denim shorts. A gold band pressing a groove into a finger. Your mouth is already open, mid-word, and you feel the shape of a sentence you didn't choose to start, hanging there, waiting to be finished by somebody who isn't coming back to finish it.

The shirt is the first thing. Iron Maiden, soft at the collar from a hundred washes, and it gives you a Saturday — Rafael twenty-six years old at the Blaisdell Center, his cousin Danny driving, both of them screaming along to a song they only half knew, the shirt bought off a folding table for eighteen dollars he didn't really have that month. It comes with the smell of beer he didn't finish and the ache in his jaw from smiling. That ache is still, distantly, in this jaw now.

The trackpad gives you more, and it gives you work instead of music: Rafael's hands, broad and sure, adjusting a collar on a man who will never know his collar was adjusted, three days ago, in the viewing room with the chairs set in their patient rows and the AC fighting the red-dirt heat leaking in under the door. Thirty-one years he's been doing this. He was twenty-four the first time he had to compose his face over somebody's father and realized the trick wasn't feeling nothing, the trick was feeling it on a five-minute delay, after the family left. His back knows this job in a language of its own — a dull line of fire low across it, worse some mornings than others, worse today because he stood too long yesterday over an open casket getting the lighting right for a viewing that starts in nine hours. Right hip, too, when he pivots wrong. He is fifty-five and every year adds a half-second to how long it takes to stand up straight after kneeling.

The wedding band gives you Marisol. Twenty-nine years of her — her voice from the kitchen right now, actually, faintly, asking has he eaten, and the tenderness that comes with hearing it is so total and unearned that for a second you almost answer her instead of the chat. Three kids raised in this house on posts, the tin roof ticking overhead in the heat the way it's ticking right now. The eldest taught him to use the app in the first place, laughing at him, filming him badly, saying Dad you have to talk to the camera not the screen. He agreed to try it because she asked him to and because he loves being teased by his children more than almost anything left to him.

The shorts, when you notice them, give you this morning specifically — Rafael pulling them on after his shower, wincing when his back caught on the bend, sitting on the edge of the bed instead of standing to do it because standing was worse today. The shirt off its hanger. Marisol's voice down the hall. He'd almost skipped the stream. He does not drink most days and hasn't tonight, no cigarette yet either, though he'll want one later out on the steps once the house goes quiet, the way he always does on the nights he lets himself feel his age.

Four viewers. Chat scrolling with words that aren't words, just noise, and Rafael — no, not Rafael anymore, just the shape of him, the cleft chin catching the ring light, the M of his hairline lit up white at the temples — leans toward the lens the way you're leaning right now, and the cadence coming out of the mouth slows, gets careful, because you are learning where your own tongue is.

You look down. The hand on the trackpad has a wedding ring worn thin along the underside, and a knot of scar tissue you didn't put there across one knuckle — his, from a hinge on a casket lid decades ago — and you turn it over slowly, like it might not hold your weight.

"Sorry," you say into the lens, in his voice, careful and slow, "gimme a second — I think I lost my train of thought."